The veteran radio presenter Pepe Domingo Castaño died this Sunday at the age of 80 in the Zarzuela Hospital in Madrid, as reported by the Cope network, where he had worked on the sports program Tiempo de Juego. “Pepe suddenly left, surrounded by his people,” said the statement on the bishops’ radio station.
“Without you, the radio will never sound the same again,” was the program he collaborated on on his account on the social network. Manolo Lama, a long-time professional colleague and in recent years in Tiempo de Juego, was one of the first to do so said goodbye to him when he became the father of the COPE editorial team. RIP Pepe Domingo Castaño,” Lama wrote.
In recent decades he has been one of the most famous voices on Spanish radio, almost always in the sports sector. Before Tiempo de Juego, the program that broadcasts Sports Day live every weekend, he was one of the main protagonists of Cadena SER’s Sports Carousel, alongside Paco González and Manolo Lama. His now famous “Hello, hello!” This is where it begins…,” with which each issue began, and its promotional tunes, full of enthusiasm and wit, always with the appearance of being improvised.
José Domingo Castaño was born in October 1942 in the town of Lestrove, A Coruña. He also worked on Cadena SER and TVE. At SER he began his career at Radio Galicia at the age of 18. Shortly afterwards, in 1966, he moved to Madrid, where he specialized in music programs. In the Red de Emisoras del Movimiento, a former network of radio stations during the Franco regime, he presented Club Musical, before Discoparada, on Radio Centro. He also took his first steps as an artist in groups such as Los Ibéricos and Los Blue Sky before beginning a tentative career as a solo singer. With his song Neniña he became number one on Los 40 Principales in 1975. His musical experiences helped him get a job at TVE in 1968, where he presented Young Library and where he met María Luisa Seco, to whom he was married between 1969 and 1981. In 1985 he married the former model María Teresa Vega, with whom he had two children.
In 1973 he returned to SER, now for the national network, and hosted youth and music programs such as Voces a 45, Viva la Radio and Sintonía sobre Ruedas. But The Great Musical was his best-known work to date and the one that won him the first of the four Ondas Awards he won throughout his career, in 1975.
Back at TVE, he hosted the show 300 Million from 1979 to 1983. He returned to SER again with various programs such as Here la SER and from then on began to move away from music and specialize in sports journalism, broadcasting the Vuelta a España and the Tour de France. In 1988 he joined the sports carousel, where he remained for 22 years, first with Antonio Martín Valbuena and then for 18 years with Paco González, where he commented on events and, above all, directed the commercials. Together with González and Lama, he left SER in the summer of 2010 to join Playing Time in Cope.
He has published three books. Sports carousel: Diary of a year (2006), about the best moments of the show, Until I run out of words (2022) and a collection of poems, Debajo de la parra (2008). He has also lent his voice to several EA Sports football video games.
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